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FORCES OF PRODUCTION
 FORCES OF PRODUCTION
A SOCIAL HISTORY OF INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION

DAVID F. NOBLE
WITH A NEW PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR

Transaction Publishers
New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.)
Copyright © 2011 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New
Jersey.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval
system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All
inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers, Rutgers—
The State University of New Jersey, 35 Berrue Circle, Piscataway,
New Jersey 08854-8042. www.transactionpub.com

This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American

National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2010043113

ISBN: 978-1-4128-1828-5
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Noble, David F.
Forces of production : a social history of industrial automation /
David F. Noble;
with a new preface by the author.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4128-1828-5
1. Machine-tools--Numerical control--Social aspects--United
States. 2. Au-
tomation--Social aspects--United States. 3. Technology--Social
aspects--United
States. I. Title.
TJ1189.N63 2011
303.48’3--dc22

2010043113
For M and D
Instruments of labor not only supply a standard of the
degree of development which human labor has attained,
but they are also indicators of the social conditions under
which that labor is carried on.

Karl Marx,

Capital, I
 Preface to the Transaction Edition
All history is present history, Benedetto Croce noted, in that it is
always seen through the lens of the moment of its writing. This book
was conceived in the mid-seventies at a moment quite different from
today. At that time the labor movement was suffused with a vitality
and vision borne of rank and file insurgencies and unprecedented
collaboration between trade unions and academics and intellectuals,
including a generation of young scientists and engineers attuned to
the interests of working people and the potential of alternative
technologies. This fertile ferment produced bold and innovative
responses to the intensifying challenges of computer-based industrial
automation (described in the epilogue of this book). The book itself
was such a response, intended as contribution to the labor
movement. It aimed to illuminate the possibilities latent in the new
technologies advantageous to workers and their unions by
demonstrating in detail and in the concrete how technology is a
political construct and, hence, subject to fundamental
reconfiguration given changes in the relative power of the parties
involved in its design and deployment. In theoretical terms, the
study was intended to demonstrate how mute forces of production
reflect in their very construction the social relations that produced
them. The underlying message is that durable alternative designs
and uses of technology presuppose significant alterations of the
social relations. Alternative technologies do not in themselves
determine changes in social relations but rather reflect such
changes. At that particular moment, such changes appeared to be at
hand given the energy and expansive outlook of the labor
movement.
Alas, that moment did not last long. By the time this book was
completed its promise had utterly vanished, in the wake of an
economic recession and corporate political consolidation that
signaled the demise of the labor movement, on the one hand, and
an unprecedented rush toward computer-based automation, on the
other. In 1982, Time Magazine named “the Computer” as its man of
the year. Two years later I was fired both by MIT for writing this
book and by the Smithsonian Institution—to which I had been
temporarily seconded as curator of automation and labor—for
organizing an exhibit on industrial automation partly based upon this
book. Before too long the book itself went out of print, the coupled
worlds of academia and publishing now faithfully reflecting a
decidedly different moment, a moment that was soberly chronicled
in my subsequent book Progress without People.
While the belated republication of this book is certainly welcome
to its author, and perhaps indicates a faint reverberation of its spirit
in some quarters, it remains to be seen whether or not its
reappearance coincides with any genuine revival of that spirit where
it really matters.

—David F. Noble
Toronto, September 2010
 Preface
This is not a book about American technology but about American
society. The focus here is upon things but the real concern is with
people, with the social relations which bind and divide them, with
the shared dreams and delusions which inspire and blind them. For
this is the substrate from which all of our technology emerges, the
power and promise which give it shape and meaning. For some
reason, this seemingly self-evident truth has been lost to modern
Americans, who have come to believe instead that their technology
shapes them rather than the other way around. Our culture
objectifies technology and sets it apart and above human affairs.
Here technology has come to be viewed as an autonomous process,
having a life of its own which proceeds automatically, and almost
naturally, along a singular path. Supposedly self-defining and
independent of social power and purpose, technology appears to be
an external force impinging upon society, as it were, from outside,
determining events to which people must forever adjust.
In a society such as ours, which long ago abandoned social
purpose to the automatic mechanism of the market, and attributed
to things a supremacy over people ("things are in the saddle, and
ride mankind," wrote Emerson), technology has readily assumed its
fantastic appearance as the subject of the story. And, as such, it has
served at once as convenient scapegoat and universal panacea—a
deterministic device of our own making with which to disarm critics,
divert attention, depoliticize debate, and dismiss discussion of the
fundamental antagonisms and inequities that continue to haunt
America.
Confronted with the unexpected and unaccepted unravelling of
their short-lived empire, Americans are now clinging to their epic
myths of national identity and destiny, hoping for yet another revival.
And central to these myths is a collective fantasy of technological
transcendence. Whatever the question, technology has typically
been the ever-ready American answer, identified at once as the
cause of the nation's problems and the surest solution to them.
Technology has been feared as a threat to pastoral innocence and
extolled as the core of republican virtue. It has been assailed as the
harbinger of unemployment and social disintegration, and touted as
the creator of jobs and the key to prosperity and social stability. It
has been condemned as the cause of environmental decay, yet
heralded as the only guarantor of ecological integrity. It has been
denounced as the handmaiden of exploitation and tyranny, and
championed as the vehicle of emancipation and greater democracy.
It has been targeted as the silent cause of war, and acclaimed as the
preserver of peace. And it has been reviled as the modern enslaver
of mankind, and worshipped as the supreme expression of
mankind's freedom and power.
The United States emerged from World War II the most powerful
and prosperous nation on earth, with other industrial nations
prostrate before it and the world's resources at its disposal. Today,
that unrivalled hegemony is being challenged politically and
economically and, as they see their dreams and dominance slip into
decline, Americans are once again responding with an appeal to
technology for deliverance. Initially, the revitalization of this religion
—which has assumed the proportions of a major cultural offensive—
has been largely rhetorical. Thus, the idea of progress has been
reinvented as "innovation," industrialization has been resurrected as
"reindustrialization," and technology itself has been born again as
"high technology." But this rhetorical escalation does little to define
the dilemma or move beyond it. Instead, and perhaps by design, the
new slogans merely keep Americans' fantasies alive, give expression
to people's desperation, and provide further escape from serious
reflection about the underlying contradictions of society. And the
increasing centrality of technology in both the domestic and world
economies makes it all the more difficult to question the latest
shibboleths, and all the more urgent. The cultural fetishization of
technology, in short, which focuses attention upon fashion and
forecast, on what is forever changing—presumably with technology
in command—has allowed Americans to ignore and forget what is
not changing—the basic relations of domination that continue to
shape society and technology alike.
I do not intend here to try to account for the ideological
inheritance of technological determinism—an impoverished version
of the Enlightenment notion of progress—except to note that it has
long served as a central legitimating prop for capitalism, lending to
domination the sanction of destiny. Fostered over the years by
promoters, pundits, and professionals, the habit of thought has been
reinforced as well by historians, who have been caught up by it too,
have routinely ratified the claims of promoters, and have found in
such determinism an easy way of explaining history. The
pervasiveness of the ideology reflects not only the fixations of
machine-based commodity production or the estrangement of
alienated labor but everyone's desire for a simplified life.
Technological determinism offers a simple explanation for things—
especially troublesome things—and holds out the prospect of
automatic and inevitable solutions. Ratifying the status quo as
necessary at this stage of development, technological determinism
absolves people of responsibility to change it and weds them instead
to the technological projections of those in command. Thus, if this
ideology simplifies life, it also diminishes life, fostering compulsion
and fatalism, on the one hand, and an extravagant, futuristic, faith in
false promises, on the other.
The aim here is to shatter such habits of thought, which allow us
to avoid thought, in order better to understand both American
technology and the society that has given issue to it. The focus upon
technology thus has little to do with any particular interest in
technology itself or in its history, for that matter, beyond the simple
recognition of the importance of technological development in
human history. Rather, this inquiry into the evolution of automatically
controlled machine tools is an attempt to demystify technological
development and thereby to challenge and transcend the obsessions
and fantasies that artificially delimit our imagination and freedom of
action. Hence, the aim is not merely to put technology in
perspective, but to put it aside, in order to make way for reflection
and revolution.

The intimidating authority that the word "technology" has come to

convey in American culture belies the ambiguity of the reality it
names. Of course, technology does seem to take on a life of its own,
when we remain ignorant of the actual process and blindly surrender
ourselves to it, or when we act from narrowly prescribed technical
ends. And the path of technological development does resemble a
unilinear course, when we yield to the hegemony of those who
oversee it. And, last, technology does appear to have its own impact
upon our lives, when we fail to recognize the human choices,
intentions, and compulsions that lie behind it. Because of its very
concreteness, people tend to confront technology as an irreducible
brute fact, a given, a first cause, rather than as hardened history,
frozen fragments of human and social endeavor. In short, the
appearance here of automaticity and necessity, though plausible and
thus ideologically compelling, is false, a product, ultimately, of our
own naivete and ignorance. For the process of technological
development is essentially social, and thus there is always a large
measure of indeterminacy, of freedom, within it. Beyond the very
real constraints of energy and matter exists a realm in which human
thoughts and actions remain decisive. Therefore, technology does
not necessitate. It merely consists of an evolving range of
possibilities from which people choose. A social history of technology
that explores beneath the appearance of necessity to illuminate
these possibilities which technology embodies, reveals as well the
contours of the society that realizes or denies them.
In an earlier work, America by Design, I attempted to challenge
technological determinism by exploring the history of the
institutions, ideas, and social groups which had come to choose
technological possibilities in twentieth-century America. Here I am
taking this exploration a necessary step further, to show how these
institutions, ideas, and social groups, operating in a context of class
conflict and informed by the irrational compulsions of an all-
embracing ideology of progress, have actually determined the design
and use of a particular technology.* Although it has belatedly
become fashionable among social analysts to acknowledge that
technology is socially determined, there is very little concrete
historical analysis that describes precisely how. This study is meant
to be a step in that direction.
In this book, then, the evolution of the design and use of
automatically controlled machine tools is traced, from the point of
conception in the minds of inventors to the point of production on
the shop floor. Machine tools were selected because they are the
guts of modern industry, and automation because it is the hallmark
of twentieth-century manufacturing technology. Throughout, the
emphasis is upon the social foundation of this technological
development, and thus upon the ambiguity of the process: the
possibilities as well as the constraints, the lost opportunities as well
as the chosen path. Rather than showing how social potential was
shaped by technical constraints —the typical and technologically
deterministic approach—I examine how technical possibilities have
been delimited by social constraints. The aim is to point up a realm
of freedom within technological development, known as politics.
For when technological development is seen as politics, as it
should be, then the very notion of progress becomes ambiguous:
what kind of progress? progress for whom? progress for what? And
the awareness of this ambiguity, this indeterminacy, reduces the
powerful hold that technology has had upon our consciousness and
imagination, and it reduces also the hold upon our lives enjoyed by
those whose social power has long been concealed and dignified by
seemingly technological agendas. Such awareness awakens us not
only to the full range of technical possibilities and political potential
but also to a broader and older notion of progress, in which a
struggle for human fulfillment and social equality replaces a simple
faith in technological deliverance, and in which people, with their
confidence restored, resume their proper role as subject of the story
called history. For it is not the purpose of this study to demystify
technology, on the one hand, only to reintroduce a new
technological determinism in some alternative, seemingly more
liberatory, form, on the other. This book holds out no technological
promises, only human ones.
*I noted parenthetically in America by Design that the
protagonists of that story (the rise of science-based industry)
were almost exclusively men. It is necessary to repeat the
observation here. For, like the technological enterprise in general,
the presumably human project of automation has been
overwhelmingly a male occupation and preoccupation. But so
what? What does this tell us about technology or the society
which creates and depends upon it? Clearly, any attempt at a
social history of technology that claims to examine technological
development as a social phenomenon must grapple with the
implications of male domination at least as much as with other
political and cultural influences. How does the historical evolution
of technology reflect the inescapable fact of male domination, of
both society and the technological enterprise it has generated?
What are the consequences of male domination of society and the
technological enterprise, both for the shape of technological
development itself and, through it, for society as a whole? These
are obvious and central questions. And again, as in America by
Design, the lack of attention to them here is not the result of any
oversight. Rather, it reflects a deliberate decision to address them
directly elsewhere, for the following reason. The very totality of
male domination renders it nearly invisible insofar as technology is
concerned and thus extremely difficult to grasp and assess.
Hence, the elusive significance of the obvious fact of male
domination must be illuminated in a very subtle, speculative, and
indirect way, quite unlike a study of the relatively apparent
influences and distortions created by class relations. This calls for
not only a different approach but a different plane of inquiry, one
which cannot readily be integrated with the present, in a sense
less fundamental, effort. To try to combine the two levels of
investigation in a single study would do justice to neither. Indeed,
it would invariably result in a diminution of the significance of
male domination by rendering it as merely one other aspect of
social determinance rather than, more appropriately, as the
central focus of a different level of analysis. To avoid these pitfalls
and difficulties, I have decided to pursue the examination of
gender influence on technological development in a separate
study, currently under way.
have always been more attuned to performance than to costs, an
attitude that can be traced back to the Army-sponsored origins of
the industry in the nineteenth century.22 In general, these producers
have concentrated more upon the lucrative sales of special
machinery than upon the less profitable lines of standard equipment.
Rather than trying to cut production costs and product prices, they
have concentrated on advertising the superior performance and
custom designs of their machinery while marking up prices
substantially to take maximum advantage of boom times. The Cold
War influence on the industry exaggerated this tendency to
emphasize performance over costs. In his 1959 report to the
European Productivity Agency on the state of the machine tool
industry, the economist Seymour Melman complained that there was
too much pressure to expand horsepower, size, and versatility, at
substantial increases in costs, even though users generally did not
take advantage of the new capabilities. Four years later, Melman
repeated his lament in an article aptly entitled "Profits Without
Productivity," this time noting specifically that "since the Department
of Defense has become the single largest customer for the machine
tool industry, the industry [has been] made less sensitive to
pressures from other customers for reducing the prices of its
products."23
The emerging military-industrial complex was really a tripartite
affair; wedding industry to the military, it also tied science closer to
both. During the Great Depression, Americans had begun to voice
their doubts about the beneficent myths of scientific salvation, and
had even begun to engage in political debate over the proper control
and use of science. In hard times, a simple faith in technological
transcendence had given way to a fear of technological
unemployment and a healthy skepticism about the promissory
pretensions and pronouncements of industry engineers and
academic scientists alike. Within the scientific community, therefore,
appeals to progress took on a defensive tone, while unemployment
among the technical ranks eroded morale still further.
Another random document with
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whose methods are worked out on a mahogany desk, with pen and
ink, or more often, perhaps, by dictation to a stenographer.
Years of careful thought and study, and the expenditure of much
time and many thousands of dollars in developing the Corning
Method have eliminated all necessity for experimental expenditure.
The building up of an Egg Farm is within the reach of any man who
will follow the Corning plan herein described faithfully and
persistently.
The man or woman who determines to pursue some branch of the
poultry industry must first decide what particular branch.
Shall it be to raise poultry for market?
If so, what? Squab Broilers? Soft Roasters? Or Capons?
Perhaps all of these.
Some utility line is the best to start with.
Fresh, sanitary eggs are a necessity and command the highest
price in the market, daily, for spot cash, just as readily as stocks and
bonds command a daily cash value in any financial market. There
can be no better proof of the truth of this than the success of The
Corning Egg Farm.
 PULLET RANGE &
COLONY HOUSES
EACH HOUSE 6′ × 10′
BUILT ON SKIDS
MOVABLE

In whatever line a beginner decides to start he needs to go straight

down that line without deviation, taking as his motto, “This one thing I
do.” In the fullness of time, having established a reputation for the
quality of his eggs and birds, the demand for his eggs for hatching
purposes and for his birds as foundation stock for other people, will
naturally come to him, and it is very profitable.
One certain fact should be settled in the understanding of every
beginner, to wit: it is not possible to invest from five hundred to five
thousand dollars in the Poultry Industry and double your money in
the first year, or even to earn 50% on the investment. Neither is it
possible with $300.00 to build a Laying House with a capacity for five
hundred birds, if the house is properly built for warmth and meets
sanitary conditions.
Housing for hens must be free from dampness. Concrete absorbs
dampness, therefore, avoid it.
Any person starting in the poultry industry for profit, and, intending
to follow it for a livelihood should begin in a small way, realizing that,
like any other business venture, it must be built up and grow from
year to year, and that, certainly for the first year, no money can be
drawn out for living expenses.
These statements are made clearly and emphatically because
quite the contrary has been given out as a fact. Such reckless
representations, because untrue, are misleading and injurious to
both those engaged in the poultry industry and also to those who
contemplate entering it, and should be branded as false, and the
authors of such statements should be prohibited from using the
United States Mails.
We are not, and make no pretense of being, philanthropists. We
have written this Book primarily with the expectation that it will make
The Corning Egg Farm and the Corning Method of Poultry Culture
even more widely and impressively known to the World, and so
benefit us by increased demand for our stock, eggs, and all other
goods we may have for sale.
Secondly, we know that the Book will benefit others if they will
follow the Corning Method and System herein laid down, and so
prove of mutual advantage to readers and authors as well.
The Single Comb White Leghorn is par excellence the Egg
Machine, provided always first class and the best strain of birds is
procured, and the Corning Strain, without doubt or question, is the
very best strain of Single Comb White Leghorns yet developed
anywhere in the World.
We know this new, large, complete and thoroughly up to date
Book will be the means of bringing us, and our unequaled Strain of
Single Comb White Leghorns, into favor with thousands of people
who, as yet, do not know us, just as the publishing of the small and
older booklet put us into touch with other thousands who are now
doing a prosperous business by the use of this same Corning Strain
Single Comb White Leghorns, and by following the Corning Method
now more completely elaborated and explained in “The Corning Egg
Farm Book by Corning Himself.”
Edward and Gardner Corning.

The Corning Egg Farm,

Bound Brook, New Jersey.
December, 1911.
The Corning Egg Farm Book
 CHAPTER I
The Building of the Corning Egg Farm
Having determined, in 1905, to engage in some business
connected with the feathered tribe, we decided to try out the squab
proposition versus market poultry. After searching over a period of
many months, in various parts of the country, with the idea of finding
a place where the existing buildings might be utilized for our needs,
we finally were obliged to abandon this idea and purchased, early in
the year 1906, twelve and a half acres of land, now known as Sunny
Slope Farm. This property lies about two miles west of Bound Brook,
New Jersey, which town is reached by the Central Railroad of New
Jersey, the Baltimore & Ohio, the Philadelphia & Reading and the
Lehigh Valley Railroads, and the Farm is most accessible, as it is on
the trolley line which connects Bound Brook and Somerville.
In the early Spring of 1906 we began our buildings, erecting a
house, for raising squabs, which would accommodate five hundred
pairs of breeding birds, a hen house of the scratching shed variety,
capable of accommodating some two hundred and fifty hens, and a
work-shop with living apartments for the resident man.
We also sunk a well one hundred and seventeen feet deep,
erecting over it a sixty foot wind-mill tower, which carries an eighteen
hundred gallon tank. From this pipes were laid to convenient parts of
the property.
Three hundred pairs of Homer pigeons were placed in the house
built for that purpose, and we went diligently to work to prove that
this was the quick and easy way to wealth which the ingenious
writers of squab literature proved so conclusively on paper.
On the chicken side of the experiment we seemed to lean
(possibly because of the fact that squabs take one into the slaughter
house business) towards one or more of the market breeds, and, to
meet the needs of this part of the business, we understood that any
of the “Rock” family were best for the purpose.

Started with 60 Buff Rock Eggs

We purchased an incubator with the capacity of sixty eggs, being
fearful of attempting the operation of a larger machine, because, like
a great many novices, we had the feeling that an incubator was a
very dangerous thing, and that anyone without a vast amount of
experience should not attempt to handle it. We placed in this
diminutive machine sixty Buff Rock eggs, and obtained a very fair
hatch. With daily contact our fear of the machine decreased, and we
exchanged it for one with a capacity of one hundred and twenty-five
eggs, and this, in turn, was exchanged for one holding two hundred
and fifty eggs.

INTERIOR STERILE LAYING HOUSE NO. 3 IN 1910

We obtained fairly large flocks of youngsters that season, but, as

we had the usual hallucination that poultry culture was really a
miracle, and required neither work, capital, nor brains, that all you
had to do was to accept the profit and the chickens did it all
themselves, we did not get so very far. The growth of the birds was
so slow they did not reach a profitable weight until the broiler market
had dropped the price to its lowest level. The pullets which we
carried through the winter never produced an egg, for the simple
reason that we had never studied the question out as to how the hen
produces an egg. In other words, our lack of knowledge of the right
methods was the reason for charging up a considerable loss instead
of profit so far as the first season’s work with hens went.
We very early discovered there must have been a considerable
amount of fiction in the writings on the squab industry. One reads
that a pair of pigeons eats nothing like the amount of food which is
required for one hen, and that they never eat more than their exact
wants require, and that when they have young in the nest, this
amount is very slightly increased. We found, however, that they ate
in season and out of season. In fact one recalls, in this connection,
and with considerable amusement, the song, in the light opera
“Wang,” of the elephant who ate all day and the elephant who ate all
night.
During our work with pigeons we tried out a number of different
varieties: Homers, Dragoons, Runt Dragoon crosses, Homer Runt
crosses, Maltese Hens, and the various crosses with Runt
Dragoons; also Carneaux. We were led to buy these fancy breeds
through the stories of extreme prices paid for large squabs, and we
bred some heavy weights only to find, from the commission man
who made a specialty of these birds, that it was impossible to pay
the price which such birds were really worth, as trade for this class
was extremely limited.
Very early in our experience we realized that the poultry side of
our experiment was very much more to our liking and offered so
much greater and more profitable outlook for our energies that we
rang down the curtain on Squab raising—and turned our attention
exclusively to the Hen.
While our minds were still running in the line of poultry for market
purposes we tried out the Black Orpingtons, the idea being that, on
account of their size, they would make ideal roasting fowls. We
found, however, that they were a very much inbred variety, and it
was almost impossible to hatch the eggs. Out of one hundred eggs,
for which we paid twenty dollars, eight chicks hatched, and these
were not of sufficient vitality to live.

ENTRANCE TO THE FARM IN 1909

More Money in Eggs

During all this time, however, we were studying the poultry
question, and had arrived at the conclusion that there was more
money in eggs, properly produced and marketed, than in any other
branch. One of the difficulties we met with in our investigations was
the fact that so many different writers had such a variety of ideas on
the same subject, and practically no two of them agreed on any
given part of poultry culture. What seemed to us even more
confusing was that, in most cases, the writer summed up his article
by contradicting everything he had said in the previous chapters. We
were finally forced to the conclusion that the raising of poultry had
not yet been reduced to a science, but was almost entirely made up
of guesses. In our investigations, however, we found in the writings
of the late Prof. Gowell, of Maine, an entirely different condition. He
was the first man, so far as our observations went, who worked on
the principle that effect followed cause, in poultry as in everything
else. We studied his bulletins with great interest, and decided we
would endeavor to prove that the same results gotten by him could
be duplicated by others.

Adopted White Leghorns

We had also been studying the condition of the egg market, so far
as New York and vicinity was concerned, and had found that this
market paid a premium for a white shelled egg. This, then, was the
determining factor in the selection of the breed of fowls, and after
gathering all the information we could regarding birds which laid
white eggs, we were satisfied, taking everything into consideration,
that for an Egg Farm, the Single Comb White Leghorn, was the only
fowl.
In the Spring of 1907 we collected a breeding pen, from different
sources, of thirty Single Comb White Leghorn yearling hens, and
three strong, vigorous cockerels. We purchased an incubator holding
three hundred and ninety eggs, and three out-door brooders, and
built a number of small Colony Houses to move the birds into as
soon as they were large enough to be transferred from the brooders.
The hens chosen for the initial breeding pen of the Farm were most
carefully selected, for even then we had in mind the result which we
intended to reach, as to the ultimate type of layer on the Farm. We
placed the resulting eggs from this breeding pen in the incubator,
using a primitive turning machine to keep them in proper condition
until the requisite number was acquired to fill the incubator. Our
hatch was a very good one, and we succeeded in raising a fair
number of the youngsters hatched.
During the Summer we erected what is now known on the Farm as
the No. 1 Laying House. This was built one hundred feet long, by
twelve feet wide, and on the same twenty foot section construction
which has proved to be so successful a plan for poultry houses. The
one mistake in this house was its width, and that has now been
remedied by widening it to the standard, sixteen feet in width, and
sixty feet in length have been added to it.
 The youngsters on range grew rapidly. We marketed the cockerels
at between eight and ten weeks of age, and they weighed from one
and a quarter pounds to a pound and three quarters. These were
sold “on the hoof,” as we had decided for the future to do nothing in
the slaughter house line, and to this decision we have strictly
adhered, shipping alive also all culls and birds of any age showing
imperfections, the majority of our stock finding ready market for
breeding purposes when we are ready to dispose of it.
As a correct record of the mortality of our hatching, and the
number of cockerels marketed, had been kept, we found that we
should have in the Colony Houses about two hundred and twenty-
five pullets to place in No. 1 House.
In catching up the birds we found that the number figured on was
about right. These two hundred and twenty-five birds went into the
House, October 31st. They were already laying on the Range.

First Use of Roosting Closets

It was a very interesting sight to us to watch these birds at work in
the first house which had ever been successfully built without
partitions, in other words, one large flock with the run of the entire
house. Others had tried it, and had failed. They had had draughts,
and had found the house, therefore, very undesirable. We conceived
the idea of roosting closets, with a partition extending some little
distance beyond the dropping boards, running from the ceiling to the
floor, thus breaking the house up so far as extended circulation of air
went, and at the same time giving the birds the benefit of the larger
area.
It was also a matter of great interest to two novices to watch the
egg output in this first house. On the first day of November five eggs
were gathered; on the second, seven; the third saw a drop to four. Of
course these pullets had been giving us more eggs than this on the
Range, but a transfer from one place to another always means a set-
back to a layer.
The middle of the month saw the hens producing above seventeen
eggs a day. December was started with an output of forty, and from
that the birds ran into larger numbers daily until the last of
December, when, with the mercury registering well down around
zero, they were turning out one hundred eggs a day. The increase in
the egg output continued steadily, and we found that March was the
record month, but the highest single day was in April, when the pen
produced one hundred and seventy eggs.

AS YOU APPROACH THE CORNING EGG FARM FROM THE PUBLIC

HIGHWAY,
IN 1911
Showing 264-Foot Brooder House, Breeding Cockerel House and Office

We were well satisfied with the result of the Winter’s work with
these pullets, and, although we did not have the knowledge that has
since come to us in feeding for eggs, the output was a most
creditable one, and we found a ready market at a good price.
Early in the Fall we had mapped out our plans for a very decided
increase in plant for the coming season. The excavation for the
Incubator Cellar, sixteen by fifty feet, had been made, and the
Brooder House above it was enclosed without difficulty before
weather of any great severity overtook us. We were blessed with a
very late Fall, and mild weather continued, with only occasional dips,
well into December, 1907.
We installed in the Cellar ten incubators, with a capacity of three
hundred and ninety eggs each. The Brooder House, with its
arrangement for Hovers and Nursery pens, was all completed, and
the month of March found us placing eggs in the machines.
 In the Fall of 1907 we had enlarged our Breeding House, so that
we were able to place in it some two hundred and fifty breeders. Out
of our original pen of thirty, we had lost two. From different sources
we bought yearling hens, and with our original twenty-eight, made up
the breeding pen.
Of course, as we had planned to endeavor to produce some three
thousand pullets for the Fall of 1908, we were obliged to very
materially supplement the product of our own breeders, with eggs
from other sources, and this we did, buying eggs from different
breeders, in widely separated territories.
As the hatching season advanced we added one more incubator
to our battery of ten, and we placed in these incubators a total of
eleven thousand eight hundred and four eggs, of which two
thousand and ninety-six showed dead germs and clear eggs on the
fourteenth day test.
The resulting number of chicks placed in the Brooder House was
five thousand eight hundred and sixty-six for the entire season.
We found that the eggs purchased did not produce anything like
the number of chicks, that is, strong, livable chicks, that did the eggs
coming from our own breeding pen, which proved to us that the
method of feeding and caring for breeding stock, pursued by others,
fell very far short of the results gotten by our own methods.

We Count Only Livable Chicks

The lesson of incubation, which it is so difficult to make people
understand, is not so much a question of how many chicks may be
hatched from a given number of eggs as of how many strong, livable
chicks are brought out. We very early in our hatching experience
decided to count only those chicks, which were strong, and
apparently capable of a steady growth and a sturdy maturity. Thus,
the count of the number of chicks produced, does not really show the
number which came out of the shells.
 OFFICE BUILDING

We were extremely fortunate in handling the youngsters in the

Brooder House, and our mortality was very low, and when the
youngsters were placed in the Colony Houses, which had been built
during the early Spring months, and placed out on the Range in
readiness for them, they were a sturdy, vigorous crowd.

Percentage of Cockerels Low

The number of cockerels was very low, and these, as rapidly as
they developed, were taken away from the pullets and placed in a
fattening pen which had been provided, and as our stock was still an
“unknown quantity” in Poultrydom, we marketed the larger part of
them at broiler size.
The pullets came on finely, and the records show that a large
number of them came into eggs when they were a few days over
four months of age.
Through the connivance of an employé we made a heavy loss in
the way of theft, and, when the final round-up of the pullets came, we
found we had one thousand nine hundred and fifty-three.
 During the Summer, we had built the No. 2 Laying House, sixteen
feet wide by one hundred and sixty feet long, and in this house the
first fifteen hundred pullets were installed, the balance going into No.
1 Laying House.
A number of visitors had called at the Farm during the Summer of
1908, and we had listened to the different stories of the ease with
which five thousand laying pullets were produced annually, but at the
end of this season we had much more respect for the number five
thousand than we ever had before, and realized very fully what it
meant to produce that number of females each year.
With the placing of these fifteen hundred pullets in this House of
one hundred and sixty feet in length by sixteen feet wide, without
being divided into separate pens, each hen having the entire run of
the House and no more (that is, she did not leave the house for a
yard, but stayed right in that space and did her work), we
accomplished what, from the standpoint of all authorities on the
subject of Poultry, was an impossible thing to do, and have the hen
produce anything. And yet each hen had only two and one third
square feet of floor space, which included the dropping boards.
The secret of being able to work the hen successfully in such a
limited space per bird is in the length of the house. In reality, every
bird has one hundred and sixty feet by sixteen feet in which to
exercise and roam.
The four hundred and fifty-three pullets which were placed in No. 1
Laying House were given the entire run of this house, of one
hundred feet by twelve feet, and yet the Egg Record for the ten
months, in which these birds never left either house, is rather in favor
of the house containing the fifteen hundred pullets. The average
number of eggs per pullet in these houses, from December 1st,
1908, to September 30th, 1909, was 143.25. Many people who had
seen the No. 2 House filled with the fifteen hundred pullets could
hardly believe what they saw.

The Great Flock System Succeeds

The extreme health and great vigor of the birds was evident to
anyone who looked in through the wire doors. Articles were written in
numerous papers stating that the thing was impossible, and that,
before many months, absolute failure would result. But in spite of all
the prophecies the great flock system, in the Corning style House,
proved by its great success, that a decided forward step had been
made in economical management and housing of poultry.
We had gone ahead handling poultry in just the same way that any
business would be handled, plus the scientific study of the anatomy
of the hen, and what it was necessary to breed in order to
accomplish a great success as a producer of large, white, uniform
eggs, with the ability added to that formula, of turning them out in
large quantities.
Callers at the Farm brought very forcibly home to us the fact, then
quite unappreciated by us, that the methods employed, and the
results obtained, were very remarkable from the standpoint of
anything done in Poultry Culture up to that time. It was pointed out
that in almost every other case it was not known by the poultryman
just where he stood at any time of the year, let alone being able to
tell where he stood every day of the year. The success of The
Corning Egg Farm really has that feature as its foundation stone.
Before the close of the ten months of laying of the 1953 pullets we
had received a number of overtures to put our methods and results
into a book, and, after a time, such a book was written. The
tremendous sale and success of that book is now a matter of history,
and the great number of people who were helped to better things in
poultry, and the still greater number of novices who were started on
the road, were enabled, through this book, to reach a success which,
as many of them testify, would have been impossible without it. In
eighteen months over one hundred and forty thousand copies of this
first book were sold. Hundreds of people came to the Farm to find
out for themselves whether or not the statements in the book were
true, and these people found everything, down to the smallest detail,
just exactly as represented.

Foreigners Visit the Farm

The Visitors’ Register, which is kept at the Farm, shows callers
from almost every nook and corner of the Globe. In Scotland, a short
distance from Glasgow, there is now almost a perfect duplicate of
Sunny Slope Farm. The owner, who has twice crossed the ocean
and come to the Farm, states that if you were blindfolded and taken
from Glasgow the three miles out to his property it would be quite
impossible for you to tell whether you were in New Jersey or
Scotland, so absolutely alike are the buildings in every detail.

BREEDING COCKERELS, FALL OF 1909

In England, a short distance from Tunbridge, the Corning Laying

House is again found. At this Farm both White and Black Leghorns
are carried, and the owners write that they are meeting with great
success in following the Corning Method.

Investigated for Germany

Germany sent a man who spent twelve months investigating the
different methods of poultry raising and housing, and he visited all
the plants of any note whatever from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
including Canada, down to the Gulf of Mexico. He did not make his
mission known, and it was only after his return to his native country
that his identity was disclosed. His report is of more than passing
interest to The Corning Egg Farm, as it states that the Method and
System envolved on The Corning Egg Farm surpasses anything that
has as yet come under his observation. The investigator is not only
conversant with what he saw in the line of poultry breeding during his
twelve months’ sojourn in America, but he is thoroughly posted in
regard to everything in Europe.
The pullets were hardly placed in the Nos. 1 and 2 Laying Houses,
in the Fall of 1908, before we began to plan for the Spring of 1909.
We had enlarged the Breeding House again, so that we now had
housed some four hundred and seventy-five yearling and two year
old hens. These were made up from our breeding pen of the year
before, and as many of our two hundred and twenty-five pullets as
qualified. We bought a few other yearling hens from different
sources, and likewise the necessary complement of cockerels.

Selection of Cockerels
We gave great care to the selection of the males heading the
breeding pen, every bird having perfect head points, being strong
and vigorous, and as large as we could find him, where we felt sure
that no outside blood had been introduced.
The Brooder House during the Fall, was materially added to,
giving us twenty Hover Pens, three feet wide, and twelve Nursery
Pens, each nearly five feet wide, this giving us a Brooder House 118
feet long by 16 feet wide.
We again this year (1909) supplemented our own breeding pen
with purchases of eggs from different sources.

Pullets Lay in 129 Days

Our hatches this Spring were very successful, and the chicks
which went up into the Brooder House were strong and vigorous.
The mortality was low, and when placed on Range they grew rapidly.
The pullets came into eggs, as they had in the two previous years,
within a few days after they passed the four months’ mile-stone.
 We had added some six Colony Houses to our range equipment.
The building originally designed for pigeons we planned to change
over into a Breeding House, for, in the Fall of 1909, we would have a
sufficient number of yearling hens to carry quite a breeding
establishment. This house was about completed in the month of
May, when it mysteriously took fire, and was a complete loss.
Fortunately the fire broke out at about ten o’clock in the morning,
and, by the timely assistance of the boys of the Wilson Military
Academy, under the able direction of the Military Officers of that
Academy, we were able to confine it to this one building in spite of
the fact that a high wind was blowing, which carried the sparks
directly on to the other buildings. The water supply on the Farm
proved more than adequate to the necessities of the occasion, and
the loss was entirely covered by insurance.
As we desired to recognize the services of the young men, and at
the suggestion of the Commanding Officer, medals were struck off
commemorative of the fire and of the bravery displayed by these
young men at this time, and were presented to them.
An addition to the Breeding House, extending over the site of the
burned building, was immediately erected, and the small building
which had been used as a fattening pen for cockerels was rebuilt,
and became the breeding pen for the production of unrelated
cockerels.
Also during this season the No. 3 Laying House was built, this
being an exact duplicate of the No. 2 House.
Our selection of Breeders for 1910 was of course made from the
birds which had completed their first ten months of pullet laying, in
the houses Nos. 1 and 2. The mortality during these months had
been about 7 per cent. With our method of selection only 950 of
these birds qualified to be used as yearling breeders, and these
were placed in the Breeding House which had been prepared for
them. We had made a most careful selection of cockerels, and these
we had reared in two Colony Houses, placed in a large yard, where
we were planning to eventually erect a Cockerel House for the
housing of cockerels specially selected for breeders.
The balance of the birds from Nos. 1 and 2, together with our
breeders of 1909, were sold, and we were able to face the hatching
season of 1910 with a very decided step forward towards the
realization of the ideal yearling breeder, which The Corning Egg
Farm is working nearer to each season.

INTERIOR LAYING HOUSE NO. 2 IN 1910

We placed in the Laying Houses Nos. 2 and 3 about 2750 pullets,

and our respect for the man who could successfully, yearly, produce
and raise to maturity five thousand pullets, increased materially.

Keeping Down Labor Bill

The question of keeping down the labor bill on the Farm has at all
times been a matter of careful study, and the machinery which is in
use is of large capacity, enabling us to turn out whatever may be
required in a very short space of time, and allowing the men to get at
other work. As an illustration; the Clover Cutter on the Farm has a
capacity of 3000 pounds an hour, cut in one-fourth-inch lengths,
which enables us, when we are cutting green food, to turn out the
amount required for the day, fill the tubs, and have it on the way to
the Laying Houses, in less than fifteen minutes.